I awoke this morning to the steady chatter of the early-rising journo-sphere (or, more accurately, the late-to-bed US journo-sphere) tweeting furiously about the arrival of Google Fast Flip, a Google Labs product that aims to give some of the serendipitous discovery aspects of a newspaper.
At first I thought it was a joke. And then I saw the number of people who were jumpimg on this idea as the saviour of journalism. (There's a sign for you about how bad things are in publishing right now.) I poked around, and came to the conclusion that it was exactly what it looked like: an experiment in showing stories more visually than the traditional text list, which has piggy-backed onto the current controversy about online content to gain a little interest and use.
So, how to join in this conversation? At first, I thought I'd write something about how this looked like a trap for publishers. And then I saw this. Curse you, Patrick!
I switched tack. Something a bit witty, something a bit satirical, perhaps? Fiddlesticks. Stymied by Richmond and his suspiciously effective postal system.
And so I browsed Google Fast Flip on both my iPhone (a curiously unrewarding experience) and my work PC. And I couldn't help feeling something akin to, well, deja vu.
Is it me, or does this view look a little familiar?
A little like this perhaps?
At first I thought it was a joke. And then I saw the number of people who were jumpimg on this idea as the saviour of journalism. (There's a sign for you about how bad things are in publishing right now.) I poked around, and came to the conclusion that it was exactly what it looked like: an experiment in showing stories more visually than the traditional text list, which has piggy-backed onto the current controversy about online content to gain a little interest and use.So, how to join in this conversation? At first, I thought I'd write something about how this looked like a trap for publishers. And then I saw this. Curse you, Patrick!
I switched tack. Something a bit witty, something a bit satirical, perhaps? Fiddlesticks. Stymied by Richmond and his suspiciously effective postal system.
And so I browsed Google Fast Flip on both my iPhone (a curiously unrewarding experience) and my work PC. And I couldn't help feeling something akin to, well, deja vu.
Is it me, or does this view look a little familiar?
A little like this perhaps?
That's the thumbnail view you get in Safari, Apple's web browser, when you open a new tab. The confluence of these two ideas suggest that, as the processing power and bandwidth develops to do these things on the fly, some form of thumbnail, graphical view on updated content might have a role in our browsing experience. And FastFlip may well be Google's first, tentative step in that direction.But FastFlip is not and, I think, will not be the saviour of traditional journals migrating online. The problem remains that the views you generated with the service are a little bit like a traditional webpage, but without all the useful bits like links. I have a sneaking suspicion that the web has already settled on the reverse chronological model pioneered in blogs and now the bedrock of Twitter and Facebook as its default method of delivering timely information. The River of News is flowing strongly. This page of thumbnails looks suspiciously like a hobby.
